1and1 VS FatCow – In-Depth Comparison on Shared Hosting

At the end of the selection from the market, 1and1 and FatCow probably stimulate your interest to opt for them. Before the final decision, there is a need to make a right judgement on the two web hosts. Their words should not be the only source of learning the two web hosts. If you are bothered to find the truth on your own, this 1and1 vs FatCow comparison will rescue you from a complicated task.

2006 is the year when we started to review web hosts for our readers. Having accumulated rich reviewing experience, we understand the most concerns during your hosting journey. Multiple aspects should be an assessment for a web host, including price, feature, uptime, speed, and support. Editors’ investigation and user feedbacks contribute to the objectiveness and comprehensiveness of this comparison.

Pros of Using 1and1 and FatCow

Here we put their cons aside for the moment. To start with, their pros on shared hosting should be clear in your mind. Below are some pros of the two web hosts.

99.9% hosting uptime

Uptime plays a crucial role in whether to continue the investigation. It is a reliable web host that can make your website content often be accessible. With the appearance of constant downtime, the efforts you have made to improve content quality will be in vain. Our first task is to check their reliability in terms of professionalism.

The average of more than 99.9% hosting uptime is a fact on the basis of our monitoring. In detail, the outage of your website will be less than 3.6 hours each month. It is impractical for you to be in pursuit of a 100% reliable web host. After all, normal maintenance is required for data centers, servers, network, etc.

30-Day money back guarantee

Under normal circumstances, most of you will lack the courage to make a long-term subscription. However, your concern still remains after a full refund period of 30 days with either 1and1 or FatCow. So it is of importance to confirm their service quality before an annual subscription. Otherwise, you have to think twice before cancelling the account with a wrong web host. Anyway, their 30-day refund policy can encourage you to take the first step.

Cons of Using 1and1 and FatCow

In fact, their cons should draw a higher attention because they will impact your hosting experience. The pros come after cons so as to help you have a clear idea.

Unreasonable pricing strategies

The fierce competition forces both 1and1 and FatCow to release some discounts which can make their hosting fees affordable to more webmasters. Without the need to pay $7.99/mo all the time, new comers can receive up to 86% discount from 1and1 for the first 12 months ONLY. With 1and1, the promotional prices are now as low as $0.99/mo. Similarly, FatCow prices the plans from $4.08/mo for the subscriptions over a year. However, the renewal prices from $12.95/mo lack competiveness in the industry.

No cPanel control panel

Linux shared hosting is a popular choice for webmasters. It could be much better with the integration of cPanel which delivers an easy hosting experience. However, 1and1 develops a custom control panel and FatCow selects vDeck control panel from the market. Both control panels have not received good feedbacks from users, being inferior to cPanel on ease of use.

Limited package features

FatCow disappoints those who have the desire for SSH access. It will be difficult to make secure connections between computers. 1and1 users have access to limited server resources in the Basic plan. More feature information is available from your view to the below table.

Long server response time

The shorter server response time, the more benefits to page loading speed. What drives visitors to much impatience with your website can be the slowness. Before our monitoring, both web hosts have been damned by a great number of their users. As the investigation deepens, we understand the reason for these complaints.

It takes 1and1 and FatCow a long time to answer each request from a browser. According to our experience, it could be a good thing if they can deliver less than 400ms server response time.

Poor support quality

The close relationship technical support has with online presence should have your attention. Strong evidence should be behind what they are saying on their official website. We have more trust in our own using experience. Their average holding time is too long to address our problems in time even through phone call and live chat. Also, there are no solutions to these questions in their support center or knowledge base.

Alternatives

It is obvious that their cons get your way to start a website with either of them. For a shared hosting solution, another web host should be your choice. But who can satisfy your need? In this case, we would like to list out the below web hosts for your reference.

How to Use

The site is designed for Joomlaers who are looking for joomla-friendly web hosting at an affordable price.

For the simple choice, I recommend you referring to the section "Overall" at the bottom of the table above, select the preference on the ranking of main aspects of a web host for Joomla, and click the "visit" button to claim the best discounts.

FTC Disclosure

I receive payment from the web hosts included in the site. However, this doesn't affect my judgetment for the review, rating and recommendation. I only promote the web hosts deserved. If you think my review helpful, please support me by purchasing a plan via my promotional links.